Gearing Up For Another Semester
It's that time of year again - I'm just about to head off to Semester 2 of my second year of First Year (I'm studying part time - it takes me twice as long to complete a "year" of study), and I've been running around like a chook with its head cut off trying to get everything organised again.

One of the key things I've had to do in the past week or so is basically get my poor unfortunate Uni machine (Elfadunk) back into working order. This involved re-downloading and re-installing the majority of the software I was using for university, as well as making sure an additional 32GB thumb drive was set up as the main location for everything to land, rather than Elfadunk's existing 32GB hard disk drive. (The hard disk is currently stuffed pretty much to the gills with Windows 10). Fortunately I have a couple of days up my sleeve there - I don't actually have to have her working until about Wednesday morning, when I have my first tutorial (2 lectures, one on Monday, one Tuesday, but I take a notebook to those and write my notes rather than type them).

I've also had to re-arrange my class schedule, because the tutorial I was expecting to be going to for one of my subjects (on a Wednesday afternoon) got cancelled out from under me, which meant I had to re-schedule it. The new tutorial time is at 8am on a Thursday morning, and I'm annoyed both because of the 8am start (means I have to dive out the door at about 7.30am at the latest) and because it stretches out my schedule over four days instead of three. But the other alternative was directly after the lecture on Tuesday afternoon, and would have required me to rush literally from one end of the campus to the other. No thanks, I had enough of that last semester.

But I'm pretty much set now. I've picked up the one textbook I had to buy, I've sorted out most of the software downloads I needed on Elfadunk (I'm just trying to install an anti-virus program on her at present), and I'm pretty much ready for the new semester to hit me full force. The freezer is newly-stocked with meat, the pantry is newly-stocked with a variety of short-cut meals for when I'm running low on spoons and organisation, the house is pretty much tidy, and I've replaced the laces in my sneakers. I'm good to go.